Salesforce is giving customers the hard sell on its updated mobile app

Salesforce keeps pushing its Salesforce1 mobile platform as a viable work hub for salespeople — and today, that push comes with a bunch of new features to sweeten the deal.

“At the end of the day, what we’re really trying to do here … is to try to win the hearts and minds of salespeople,” Salesforce SVP Mark Woollen told VentureBeat.

“And as a salesperson, if you can run a business from your phone, well, amen to that.”

Later today, the cloud software giant will announce general availability of its new Salesforce1 mobile app. The update will lay the groundwork for a host of new features. Here are some of the highlights:

• Salespeople will be able to approve quotes and proposals from their mobile devices.
• Salesforce’s Chatter tech will scan conversations to auto-generate relevant topics for all deals, improving search. Salesforce argues this will help employees collaborate on deals in a more serendipitous way.
• Folks using Salesforce’s Today app — a Salesforce-connected calendar that merges your personal and business lives — will be able to log mobile calendar events in Salesforce1, add new contacts to Salesforce1 from calendar events, access account records from calendar events, and more. Think of it like Google Now for your business life, says Salesforce.
• Salesforce’s Work.com — management software for goal setting, rewards, and performance appraisals — will become available through the Salesforce1 app.
• Salesforce’s mobile analytics are getting more interactive. Customers will be able to dive into a data set from a dashboard, and embed third-party visualization components inside the Salesforce1 app.

A select number of Salesforce’s 100,000 Sales Cloud customers are already using the new features, which will be available to everyone in July.

For its next major update, Salesforce intends to bring Pardot’s B2B marketing automation capabilities directly to Salesforce, both on the desktop app and inside Salesforce1.

The needs of marketers and salespeople often overlap, said Woollen. That’s why Salesforce aims to offer Sales Cloud customers the same capabilities marketers are already using with Pardot.

Woollen declined to disclose the number of Salesforce customers using the Salesforce1 platform, but the number of active app users are on the rise. That’s probably a relief to Salesforce, which botched several past mobile efforts before landing on Salesforce1.

Salesforce competes with customer relationship management (CRM) offerings from companies like Microsoft, Oracle, Workbooks, and others. You can see how they stack up against each other in our list of top 10 CRM services.